MAHA Keeps Being Weird as Hell About Fertility | WIRED

Overview

The home page for Moms.gov, the Trump administration’s recently launched website for “new and expecting mothers,” is a trad wife’s dream.

Featuring soft pastel graphics and a photo of a young, white, blond woman in a field clutching her pregnant belly, the website offers resources for women of reproductive age such as anti-abortion “pregnancy centers,” as well as a CDC website listing potential workplace hazards for expecting mothers without noting accompanying legal protections for pregnant women.

Details

If you were conspiratorially minded, you might conclude from the website alone that the Trump administration is champing at the bit for young (white and blond) women to have as many (presumably, also white and blond) babies as possible. But as it turns out, you don’t need to be conspiratorially minded at all to arrive at that conclusion, because on Monday, the president and senior health officials reiterated their hardline pronatalist agenda at a maternal health care event.

During the event, Trump announced a proposal for employers to offer a health care coverage option for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility treatments, which are currently not included under most insurance plans. Though the plan would not mandate employers to offer such coverage, Trump said that he was deeply invested in expanding fertility options for women, declaring he had “learned everything” about female reproductive health and that he was “the father of fertility.”

This was not even the creepiest quote to emerge from the event. That honor goes to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who proclaimed that the country was undergoing a fertility crisis that was a “threat to our national economy and our security.” As evidence, he cited factors such as endocrine disrupting chemicals, pesticides, and other potential contributors to hormonal imbalances causing infertility, maligning the “toxic soup that our young women are walking around in.”

But it wasn’t just women who were blamed: he also cited a statistic that men in 1970 had “twice the sperm count our teenagers do today,” referring to this as “an existential crisis for our country.”

In response to questions about Kennedy’s seeming fixation on teenage sperm, White House spokesperson Kush Desai tells WIRED: “It takes systemic change to turn America’s birth rates around. The Trump administration is leaving no stone unturned to address this challenge, from researching long-ignored chronic health issues that affect fertility to pushing policies that will improve childcare, healthcare, and housing affordability.”

The sperm claim, which Kennedy has repeated multiple times throughout his tenure in the administration, is very much in line with the Make America Healthy Again movement’s fixation on masculinity, with the HHS regularly touting testosterone therapies and RFK Jr. posting fitness videos of himself bro-ing out with Kid Rock. But the science is extremely dubious, says Ashley Wiltshire, a fertility specialist at Columbia University Fertility Center, noting that the research this claim is ostensibly based on has been “debunked” by more contemporary studies. A metanalysis published last year in the Journal of Fertility and Sterility found that sperm count among men had not declined between 1970 and 2023, but stayed relatively stable over time.

Though Wiltshire notes that male infertility has indeed been on the rise globally (not just in the US), the specific causes of this decline remain unclear, nor do they seem directly related to the sperm count study cited by Kennedy. “We just don’t have the evidence to say” that American men are undergoing an “existential” fertility crisis, Wiltshire says.

Not to be outdone, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration’s head of Medicare and Medicaid, said at the event that one in three Americans are “underbabied,” meaning they “don’t have any children,” or “have less children than you would normally want to have.” He said this trend was contributing to declining US fertility and replacement rates, which could contribute to long-term economic instability. It is true that fertility rates in the United States are declining, with the US hitting a record low in 2024 of women having an average of 1.6 children throughout their lifetimes. But the birth rate is still outpacing the death rate in the US(unlike in countries like Japan, which is actually experiencing a significant population decline crisis), and declining birth rates are currently being seen in most major industrialized countries.

It’s telling, though not surprising, that in discussions about boosting the American birth rate, Trump administration officials are not focusing on the actual reasons women may be having fewer children. Extensive research shows that the skyrocketing costs of housing and health care, as well as the absence of policies such as universal child care or mandated paid family leave for private employees, are far more powerful contributing factors than, say, pesticides or teenage sperm count. And while increasing fertility treatment access is undoubtedly a good thing, because Trump’s proposal does not mandate employers offer IVF coverage and may not necessarily reduce overall costs, it prompts questions about who, exactly, such legislation benefits.

Hyperbolic language such as warnings about an “existential” fertility crisis are part and parcel with the administration’s larger pronatalist agenda, as outlined in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for the second Trump administration. Indeed, “Trump accounts,” the administration’s recent financial proposal outlined on Moms.gov for children to receive

1,000 in an investment account when they turn 18, echo similar monetary incentives proposed by Project 2025, including

5,000 “baby bonuses” for women who have children.

Though bribing ladies to get pregnant will likely do little to offset the obstacles actually preventing women from having kids in the US, such policies speak to the fundamentalist priorities of this administration.

The Trump administration is less concerned about declining fertility rates than it is about “control,” says the National Women’s Law Center’s chief external affairs officer, Uma Iyer. She characterizes Moms.gov as “part of a broader effort to undermine women’s autonomy and power.”

Rather than adopt policies that would actually support young people in the United States, Trump officials are focusing their attention on encouraging a very specific type of woman to get knocked up and go frolic in fields—and they appear willing to go to great lengths to make this a reality.

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Key Takeaways

The home page for Moms
Featuring soft pastel graphics and a photo of a young, white, blond woman in a field clutching her pregnant belly, the website offers resources for women of reproductive age such as anti-abortion “pregnancy centers,” as well as a CDC website listing potential workplace hazards for expecting mothers without noting accompanying legal protections for pregnant women
If you were conspiratorially minded, you might conclude from the website alone that the Trump administration is champing at the bit for young (white and blond) women to have as many (presumably, also white and blond) babies as possible
During the event, Trump announced a proposal for employers to offer a health care coverage option for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility treatments, which are currently not included under most insurance plans
This was not even the creepiest quote to emerge from the event